Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660-1688 by Jacqueline Rose (review)

How many academic books have lasting relevance three-quarters of a century after their original publication? The answer, surely, is not many. And those that do tend to address subjects whose importance can withstand even the vagaries of academic fashion, ones which cannot, in retrospect, easily be carbon-dated to a particular half-decade or be fingered as little more than derivative products of one or another intellectual school. They deal, in other words, with subjects of lasting importance, and they do so with intellectual honesty, scholarly rigor, and analytical creativity. By this standard, scholars of late seventeenth-century England a century hence will continue to read with profit Jacqueline Rose's Godly Kingship in Restoration England, a wide-ranging, deeply learned, and sure-footed work of intellectual history.

The royal supremacy during the reigns of Charles II and James II might not immediately jump out for most as an attractive subject, since so many other works have dealt with ecclesiology and episcopacy during the early modern period. But as Rose, an historian at the University of St. Andrews, demonstrates quite clearly, these earlier studies have mostly failed in their analyses because they have, perhaps perversely, robbed early modern ecclesiology and episcopacy of their inherently religious dimensions. Rose has the good sense to recognize that a secularized treatment of the subject would have been one wholly unrecognizable to early moderns and she regularly and rightly insists upon the centrality of religion in early modern English political thought, in contrast to many scholars of her generation. Moreover, Rose has recognized that while others have dealt with ecclesiology and episcopacy, they have not dealt explicitly or systematically with the royal supremacy. And, as she shows, this is problematic, since an investigation of the supremacy helps to answer some fundamental questions about the nature of politics and religion during the Restoration period. What was the nature of royal authority? What authority had the monarch over the national Church? What sort of church was the established Church of England? How should the state deal with religious pluralism? As Rose rightly notes, the royal supremacy helps to illuminate the answers to these questions, providing "an unexpectedly fruitful route into understanding critical issues of kingship, toleration and Reformation history" (2-3).

Yes, Reformation history, not Restoration history. For, as Rose makes abundantly clear in her introductory chapter, the Reformation did not end in the sixteenth century. Like the past in Yoknapatawpha County, the Reformation was not dead during the late seventeenth century; it wasn't even past. The English Reformation had commenced in earnest during the early 1530s as a way to solve a very particular political problem for a very single-minded English monarch. Yet that Henrician Reformation itself spun out of control, spawning religious, political, and intellectual problems which continued to bedevil the English nation for centuries afterwards. Indeed, the English Reformation consumed the English well into the late seventeenth century, providing not just the backdrop but the very stuff of political debate. This crucial insight that "the Restoration [was] part of the 'long Reformation'," combined with her recognition that early modern labels, no less than modern ones, were contested, has enabled Rose to say things about her subject — the royal supremacy — and about the Restoration period more generally that are both novel and true.

One of the chief products of England's Reformation was the royal supremacy, or rather, as Rose illustrates, the royal supremacies. For "the supremacy forged by monarchical empowerment turned out to be rather more complex than its creators imagined" (275). What began as an anti-popish concept — the English Church is beholden not to Rome — became, in the hands of subsequent generations a series of concepts, not all of them reconcilable. And one of the reasons that the royal supremacy underwent conceptual cell-division was because it touched on so many different and important subjects which related to the governance of the realm, five...